Qed

OMG what have they done? post #spill

A week ago the Libs looked like a rabble, then they spent the week proving it and now, after a bit of a break and a nice night’s sleep they wake up an elect TONY ABBOTT as their leader?

Barry Cassidy summed it up with Annabel Crabb on the rather extravagant ABC coverage of the #spill; the election of Abbott is going to give the media plenty to talk about and judging by the level of coverage afforded to the election of the man in red speedos, they could well be right.

Surely though, tomorrow, or the day after or sometime in the very near future the rest of the Liberal Party are going to look back at what happened today and in the last week and ask themselves the very obvious question, what have we done? It might be the moment when Tony Abbott answers yet another question on climate change, or it could be another day when Tony resurrects the ghost of Howard’s Work Choices, maybe it will be when the Mad Monk starts preaching about the rights of unborn children; really it must happen unless the entire rank and file of the Australian Liberal Party are stark raving mad.

And then what? Will they look back on today and wonder? Will they pull out the recording of Malcolm Turnbull where he displayed his political stature in the face of incredible adversity and compare that to the talking mechanical robot they chose instead and say to themselves “we were wrong”? Probably not, since honesty isn’t a particularly useful commodity in a politicians toolkit.

Bon voyage good ship Australian Liberal Party. Watch out for the icebergs.

Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content | Slashdot

This is tech humour, it mightn’t appeal to many but I’ve lifted a few gems to lighten the mood a little

presidenteloco writes

Dear Mr Murdoch

If you don’t want to be hyperlinked to, you might consider not putting your content on the worldwide web.

interkin3tic says:

You have to look at it from his perspective.

Basically his perspective is “Someone else has money. I want it.” …

Not the best perspective by my standards, but he has many times more money than I do, so who am I to say he’s a F*#@#ing idiot.

gslavik offers this brief analysis -

Media companies want Google to pay, not us (consumers). Because you can charge Google $X (where X has 7 digits) whereas to get consumer money, you have to produce a useful product.

Whereas fuzzyfuzzyfungus wants to hand Rupe a box of tissues…

Oh; but the poor baby wants it both ways: He wants google to index his stuff, and pay him for the privilege of indexing his stuff.

GaryPatterson stands up for Australia -

Murdoch is not an Australian – he gave up his citizenship as soon as it hindered his US interests….On behalf of Australians everywhere, I’m sorry that he’s your problem now.

ivoras maintains there is a win-win solution:

There’s a very simple, mutually beneficial solution to this – Google should do Mr. Murdoch a favor and stop indexing his content. It’s really a win-win scenario for everyone (including readers).

Cytid is obviously a punter -

Rupert is something else…I bet he thinks the dewey decimal system “steals” content from libraries by classifying and categorizing books.

HangingChad on the other hand seems resigned to a life without Rupert -

Gosh, what tragedy. Guess we’ll just have to suck it up and get by without their relentlessly negative hate spew.

Don’t let the search engine door hit you on the way out bunghole.

But Screwmaster has an ulterior motive. He thinks Google has much more important things to do…

Google’s spider really has better things to do than index Fox News … for example, my great aunt Betty’s second cousin’s daughter’s wedding photos.

All of them perfectly good and reasonable suggestions! Perhaps I should print them out and mail them to Mr Murdoch. I’m feeling so generous I might even put a stamp on the envelope

Slashdot News Story | Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content.

The news you have to pay for

Ok let’s try this idea. You have a business, its core activity consists of people stringing a few words together based on information received. They, the stringers-of-words, do this stringing thing regularly and they also spend more than the average amount of time reading other stringers-of-words. Then there is a certain accumulated body of knowledge that goes with this activity. All up, its something that’s probably worth money to somebody.

Now do you, a fully paid up member of the public, think you should pay for these words strung together with some care and or ability? Why should you? Libraries exist, you can get words AND pictures for free in a library. And if you think about it, the content in a newspaper is pretty cheap on a per word basis. Then there’s TV, its free and the radio, its free too. Now don’t split hairs and tell me that you need to buy a TV to watch one or that both need electricity because that’s not really the point, except it might be but that’s later. For the time being, you can get free TV and radio content, you can even get free PRINT content. I can pick up free magazines and newsletter everywhere, some of it I need to actually tell people I don’t want it so desperate are they for my eyes to consume their words.

Right, I think we have established that as far as consumers are concerned, a lot of media is now free. Free as in no need to pay every time you want to access it. But some of it isn’t. There’s pay-tv for example and then there are the movies, there are books that you can buy as opposed to borrow and of course there are newspapers. These things people pay money for because by and large they are better than the stuff you don’t have to pay for, the old adage you get what you pay for and so on.

So you might want to watch the live telecast of Amazonian Fighting Fish battle it out for global supremacy and you can afford a few dollars a week so pay-tv is on your shopping list. Personally, I don’t really care for Amazonian Fighting Fish. I just like the news and current affairs. It’s boring information some of the time but strangely we have evolved this thing called government which also makes the news. The government is BIG, they can use force to make people do stuff they don’t want to and they can take money off people to pay for other stuff so keeping an eye on the government is probably a good idea. Certainly the early proprietors of newspapers thought so, hence this rather quaint notion of the press as some sort of watchdog on the activity of government. Notice here that big business escapes attention, its all about the role of Government.

But why should anyone take it upon themselves to be so unselfish, to go to all the trouble to uncover facts about the state just so they can tell me and others like me what the government is up to, and do it for free? Interesting question don’t you think?

Now in the past, before the death-of-journalism, such activities were paid for by businesses that made money by selling advertising which appeared along side this vitally important job of watching the government, ie government can’t be trusted and by the way buy a new car. Uh yeah. Why should I pay for that? I mean, let’s just examine this idea for a moment. Keeping across the role of government, ok, good idea, see above. Buy a new car, well don’t we have this little problem with carbon and isn’t oil running out and aren’t there enough cars on the road and why do I need a car to drive to work when a thousand other people are doing the same thing as me. I think you understand where I’m going with this but I’ll spell it out.

The information sources that exercise their right to scrutinise and criticise the government are biased. The bias is so blatant it almost can’t be believed, but such is the power of a big lie that most people don’t even question it. The media is about delivering messages to you, the so-called public. One message that almost completely escapes censure is that we must have the economic system we currently have. It might be an economic system that produces marked inequality or destroys our environment but these consequences are never attached to the underlying economic order. The bad things that happen just happen, if everyone is going to have a new car and the latest designer thingymajig, well we need an ECONOMY and it has to GROW.

Where are the watchdogs? Those caring sharing souls who are so keen to spill the beans on the reckless excesses of the state? Not interested! And the businesses running these media outlets, the corporations that make billions out of these messages, do you really think they’re interested? Seriously?

So the next time someone tries to tell you that you need to pay them so they can keep telling you that about all the bad things the state does and why you just have to have that holiday at the South Pole, it might be worth your while to stop for a moment and ask yourself what else is going on. There might be a whole different world of information out there that you might never know about because it isn’t in the best interests of the media to tell you. Or you could just trust them I suppose, after all not just anybody can string a few words together.

As a complete aside, its just occurred to me that there are some parallels here with the picture theory of representation, hmmm.